Last Day in London and Final Looks at London

Days 30 and 31:

On my last day in London, I decided to pack all my stuff before heading out to wander around the river front with a few girls from my class.  We turned in our Oyster cards (London subway system cards) to see whether we had any money left.  Then we got Slush Puppies and wandered through the Turkish Festival and down to the Globe Theatre and the Millennium Bridge. 

Yummy!

Sand art on the banks of the Thames

Millennium Bridge from below

Millennium Bridge

View of Globe Theatre from Millennium Bridge

I ended my day at Gourmet Burger Kitchen having dinner with a group of my classmates.  The oreo milkshake and the burger were delicious, and the company was entertaining!  Since it was raining on our walk home, I decided to embrace the rain and stomp in puddles.

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The next morning, I woke up at 4:00am (yikes!) to be ready to leave for the airport on a 5:30 coach bus.  Here are the pictures of my last looks at London.

Goodbye, London!  I have enjoyed my time here, and I will be back one day :) 

Digging in the Dirt

Day 11:

Today we visited the London Archeological Archive Research Centre (LAARC) at the Mortimer Wheeler Building.  This is where all of the Museum of London’s items that aren’t on display live.  It used to be a steel tubing warehouse, so they had to work around that structure when they turned it into LAARC.  We started in the Social and Working History Collections section that included toys and games.  The archive collects all items that have ever been used in London or have been connected to London in some way.  They do not have duplicate items, and each item is numbered and cataloged in Mimsy (which is their cataloging system).  Their storage rooms have sensors that send environmental information to a control system that can adjust as necessary.  

A look into the storage room

They have everything from Legos and matchbox cars to dollhouse furniture and puppets.  Included in this area is a large telephone operator’s switchboard that used to belong at Buckingham Palace.  The lines are still labeled for the Queen’s rooms and the Palace staff.  They are deciding whether to display it under its current conditions or to conserve and restore it before they display it somewhere.  While they make those decisions, it sits in the storage area at LAARC. 

Buckingham Palace Switchboard

In another area, the shelves hold parts of the interiors of buildings. The process for moving those pieces is to deconstruct the building, number and label each piece, and then reconstruct the pieces at a later date.  The pieces we saw were still labeled to show their building of origin.  The pieces in the storage area are available to researchers by appointment, and they have a little bit of everything that one might think to research.  The halls house the items that are too large or too heavy to move, such as a gold weighing machine.  

Floor tiles from a deconstructed building

Labeled piece of the Granville Theatre

LAARC has a conservation room complete with a hospital-grade x-ray machine.  All metal items are x-rayed when they arrive so that the archaeologists can see any etchings or engraving on the surface of the pieces. 

The oldest pieces at at the archive were the prehistoric flints, axeheads or arrowheads, that had been excavated at Heathrow Airport.   These prehistoric flints are kept in cabinets in the hallway on the route to the processing area.  The van drivers visit excavations and bring the loads of stuff there for processing.  Each bag is coded with a 3-letter/2-number code (eg, BZY 10).  The letters refer to the streets or area where the material was excavated, and the number refers to the year the excavation began (not the year it was actually found).  Also on the labels is a context number, which indicates the 3D position in the ground of the object.  The researchers want to be able to reconstruct the stratigraphy (layers in the ground) of the dig at a later date.   The description of the find is included on the label so that later users will know what they are seeing.  

I found it interesting that waterlogged conditions are excellent for preserving wood, leather, bones, etc.  Their current excavation site is known in the BBC as the “Pompeii of the North” because the material they are processing is in such good condition.  Bags of known material are not the only things brought back for processing.  Buckets of soil samples are also returned to LAARC to be sifted to find seeds, small bones, etc. and those small pieces from the soil can tell researchers about eating habits of the people living there.    From each dig, researchers also collect 3-4-meter long soil cores to study.  

Soil Cores

A "Chicken Feeder," Perhaps

Having family members who enjoy relic hunting back home, I kept thinking about how much they would drool over talking to these experts and seeing the processing area and all of the boxes of materials they have found. 

As we were wandering through, we saw one of the researchers who was in the middle of processing some of his finds from his most recent find.  He stopped to show us what he was working on and tell us about what he had found.  He was excited to be working on a 17^th century site instead of the Roman sites he had been working on for so long.  He showed us a porridge dish that was made of tin instead of iron, door handles that were wooden and iron, spindles, glazed pots that had been through a double firing process (new technology for the time), decorated stoneware, and what he thinks is a chicken feeder.  The next step in processing the material is drying it.  Most material is air dried or oven dried.  The researcher showed us some of the stuff from his find that was in the process of drying: shears, spoons that had the owner's initials on the top, a cloth seal (that was pinned to the cloth and gives the clothes' place of origin), and a needle.  

More of the finds from the 17th century dig

 Once we left the processing area, we headed up to the archive storage area.  We passed a stone cannonball which had been excavated at The Theatre.  Our guide told us that every Shakespeare theatre excavation had included a stone cannonball, which they believe was a prop used to create weather noises (such as thunder) when rolled across the floor.  

LAARC is the world's largest archaeological archive, with 10.5 km. of shelving and that number is increasing daily.  They run an extensive volunteer program on a 10 week basis, and then once their 10 weeks are up they can begin a longer program.  Additionally, LAARC has work experience programs for teenagers and internships for college students.  Mostly, the volunteers and interns repackage and catalog materials to make it easier to access by users.  

The archive itself is organized by year, with bulk materials arranged around the outer edge.  Each item has a card that includes location information and a scale drawing of the actual item.  They keep a paper copy and a digital copy of these cards.  They also maintain a physical file that includes the original plans of each dig.  The location of each find, stratigraphy information, and provenance documentation for each item is kept in these files.  These are also kept digitally and on paper.

Pottery reference drawers allow users to see sample pieces of every type of pottery to compare the different ages and types.  Each is labeled with a card indicating location, age, material, and other necessary information.  

Pottery Reference Drawer

One piece in the collection a few years ago had a very specific plan in case of a fire.  The Lord Mayor's Coach required specific workers to report to the left wheel, the right wheel, the front to act has horses, etc. in case of a fire to evacuate it from the building.  

They also have the top part of a boot found at the Rose Theatre, which is located next to the Globe Theatre.  The boot is quite well-preserved and would have been worn by Shakespeare's contemporaries.  

Top Piece of the Boot from the Rose Theatre

The archives keep the material found at the dig site, but they also maintain the paperwork from the dig itself and photographs that documented the dig.  They store journals, inventory lists of finds, budgets, weather conditions, site director's notes, etc. from each dig so that researchers can go back and find out information about the conditions of the find if necessary.  

At the end of our tour, we went into the Ceramic and Glass Store, which is where the donations of ceramic and glassware are stored.  These items have not been excavated, but instead have been given to the archive.  They have everything from Roman pots to Frechen steins.  Here are some of my favorites.

 

 

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Tonight we went to the Open Air Theatre in Regent's Park to see Pride and Prejudice with a few girls from my flat.  P&P is one of my favorite books, so I was looking forward to a little Darcy/Elizabeth Bennett fun in the park.  The production was fantastic!  Rob Heap, who plays Collins, stole the show with an over-exaggerated, "chicken-legged" version of the character.  He was brilliant!  The rest of the cast was excellent, too, but I adored his physical humor.  Regent's Park, itself, was a beautiful setting for the play and for the walk to and from the theatre.  I took pictures of the flower gardens near the entrance to the theatre.  

 

From the Barbican to St. Paul's

Day 5:

We started the day at the Barbican, a public library in the Barbican Centre in London.  The Barbican librarians greeted us outside to give us a little background information about the library and what we would see today.  The library began on Cannon Street and moved to its current location in 1982.  The Barbican area was bombed flat during World War II and rebuilt afterwards.  It was originally social housing (lower-income), but it is mostly higher-income housing how.  The Barbican Center includes theaters, cinemas, culture and heritage centers, the library, concerts, etc.  Nearby, there are churches (including St. Giles Church where Milton is buried and Shakespeare was a congregant), schools, and housing.

View of St. Giles Church from the Barbican lobby

The two main groups that make up the constituency of the Barbican Library are people who live in London and people who work in London.  The residents generally come into the library on the weekend, while the workers generally come in between 12 and 2 during the week.  Because the Barbican serves so many workers, the demographics of their average patron is not the same as most public libraries.  Instead, they serve more men than women, and their average age range is between 25 and 45 instead of much older or much younger.  Self-service opportunities are important for busy working adults, so they offer self-checkout, self-return, online access for renewal and for use of many of the resources, and they have strict guidelines about computer usage within the library.  In fact, 14-15% of materials checked out are self-issues.

They use RFID technology to keep track of their books and other materials.  Because they were an early-adopter of the technology, much of it is outdated now.  However, it is useful and still in working order.  Each item has a date label and a bar code.  They have materials that date back to 1738 that can still be checked out to patrons.  In addition to the two layers of rolling stacks (which is their method of storing their items that are not available for display, but are still usable), they offer online catalog resources such as ebooks, audio ebooks, Ancestry website access in the library, and music or art websites.

Some of the rare books on display that are available for check-out.

Audio books on display that are available for check-out.

In order to reach all patrons, the Barbican Library partners with an adult education program to offer ESL classes a few times each week and maintains a Skills for Life collection available for check-out and patron use.  Additionally, they offer books on CD and large-print versions of many books.  These are mainly used by a population of homebound individuals who are visited by library staff on a regular basis.  The library offers a variety of reading groups, including staff-led reading groups and patron-led groups that are simply monitored or facilitated by staff members.

The library has a specific Arts Library which includes DVDs and a small number of bluray discs.  The feature films and television shows are available to rent, but the instructional DVDs are available to borrow for free.

The award-winning Music Library is in a separate section, as well.  The exhibit leading to the Music Library was particularly interesting to me, but I wasn't allowed to take pictures of it.  It was called "Trees and Their Music" by Caroline Tate.  The artist had incorporated pieces of music into her paintings of various trees, whether by using the music as aural inspiration or as part of the painting itself.  Some of the pieces had pieces of sheet music embedded into the painting of the tree.  They were beautiful!  The library partners with nearby music schools because it is one of the two largest music schools in London (the other is Westminster).  The two share books and other printed music, but not CDs.  Westminster focuses on the older music, while Barbican focuses on more contemporary, modern music, CDs, scores of musical theater, and popular music.  Their CD collection is extensive at at least 15,000 CDss and covers a wide spectrum of musical genres.  They have also begun offering a music streaming service that is available from their website and offers access to the equivalent of 70,000 CDs.  This service is one of the most-used electronic resources that the City of London Library Services subscribes to.  One unique aspect of the music library is the digital piano available for patrons to use to test out music or to practice.

Music Library Shelves

 

The Barbican's children's section is one of the largest children's libraries in the city.  They have at least 24,000 items (including books, ebooks, audiobooks on CD, playaways, etc.) available to children from birth to age 14.  Schools and nurseries use the library's services by either bringing students to the library or by bringing the librarians to the schools on a regular basis.

  

Displays in the children's section of the library:

Librarians also offer reading groups that are divided by age, Book Start programs (in which parents get a pack that includes a book), storytimes three times each week, Saturday events with crafts or guest visitors, and Summer Reading Challenge (a national program that challenges kids to read at least six books in order to receive a prize).  They also participate in the Read to Succeed volunteer program, which partners kids with adults to help improve the reading skills of the child and allows the adult to help encourage the child to read more.

The Young Adult section is located just outside of the Children's Section and is quite small.  This picture encompasses about a third of it:

From the Barbican Library, we headed to a visit with a former BSP student before we continued on to St. Paul's Cathedral to visit their library and collections.  Unless you have been to a major cathedral before, you cannot fully grasp the feeling of walking into one.  I went to St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican City when I was 14, so I thought I was prepared for heading into St. Paul's Cathedral.  I wasn't.  The main area of the cathedral is amazing, breathtaking, stunning, and monumental.  Yes.  However, we were able to go into the gallery area and the library, and we saw things that most people don't even realize exist in that same building.  THAT was amazing, breathtaking, stunning, and monumental!  To begin this journey, we ascended 141 steps to the triforium level (this comes from the Latin for three arches).  We exited the stairway through a door into the gallery area between the outer and inner walls.  The dome space was just to the west of us, and we could see William Blake Richmond's tessurae mosaics on the ceiling.  We quickly learned that renowned English architect Christopher Wren had designed the building, and that there had been four or five cathedrals on this same site over the centuries. 

Exterior of St. Paul's Cathedral (Photo Credit: http://www.stpauls.co.uk/Cathedral-History/Explore-the-Cathedral/Exterior-and-Churchyard)

One of the first pieces in the gallery was an instructional tool used to teach kids about architecture and design.  There is an arch that has been created using the inverted chain method to make it stable and safe.  Robert Hooke, Christopher Wren's assistant and a scientist of his own right, figured out how to use this method to create the curved arches found in the cathedral.  This particular part of the exhibit reminds us that cathedrals are not always only about religious education, but they are often about science, mathematics, architecture, history, culture, and literature as well.

As we made our way through the gallery space, we saw a Latin inscription above a door.  "Faciendi plures libros nullus est finis." This translates to "Of making many books, there is no end."  It is a quotation from Eccelesiastes 12:12 (which continues, "and much study wearies the body.") that had been added recently in the terms of the age of the cathedral. 

Christopher Wren's design of the cathedral is similar to the design of Thomas Jefferson's home, Monticello in Charlottesville, VA, and to the design of St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican City.  The model of the cathedral allows visitors to see the entire building at once and admire the architecture.  Surrounding the model, the drawings of the various plans that Wren and the church leaders decided against show other design styles considered.  The model looks small in this picture, but it is actually a 1:25 scale model of the actual proposed building.  The model does not represent the final design of the cathedral, because Wren changed his mind after completing the model.

Model of St. Paul's Cathedral (Photo Credit: http://www.stpauls.co.uk/Cathedral-History/The-Collections)

The final place our guide showed our group was the library, itself.  The library is small, and has numbered shelves surrounding a center area.  We were not allowed to roam around or browse, but we could see quite a bit from where we stood.  The "yummy book smell" (or leather disintegrating) overpowered us as soon as we entered what felt like hallowed space.  He showed us a volume of St. Paul's epistles from 1515.  It had been rebound and was missing the clasps.  It was leather-bound and had bore-holes from an insect trying to reach the wood inside.  The leather cover had portcullises impressed into it.  As he showed us the book, he told us that it cost approximately 300 GBP to reback a book (300 GBP = $452).  He also shared that the Victorians often rebound books, and that any books in this library that had a white stripe had been rebound during Victorian times. 

The Library at St. Paul's Cathedral  (Photo Credit: http://www.stpauls.co.uk/Cathedral-History/The-Collections/The-Library)

The original cathedral and library burned in the Great Fire of London in 1616, so the church had to beg for donations to restock their library shelves.  The Bishop of London donated 2,000 books.  Because the library lost its collection in the fire, the current collection is mostly 17th century materials, with some 16th century items, and 9 incunables (books that date from 1501 and before).  They have a psalter on display that may be (no one knows for sure) one of only three books that escaped destruction in the Great Fire of London.  A psalter is listed, but there is no way of knowing whether this particular psalter is the same one.  Once we had finished looking at the delightful collection in the library, we trekked back down 141 steps to the cathedral floor.  I will never look at churches like St. Paul's Cathedral the same way again.

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After our library visits had been completed for the day, a few of us decided to head to Kensington Gardens near Hyde Park to visit the Peter Pan statue that resides there.  After a few wrong turns and a walk through very posh streets past the Embassies of Oman and Bulgaria (both are very fancy, by the way!), we found Kensington Gardens.  However, we had inadvertently found the opposite side of the park, so we began our walk through the park to see what other things we could find.  We passed a very ornate monument to King Albert, walked past the bench Johnny Depp sat on in the movie Finding Neverland, and passed the Italian Gardens.  

King Albert's statue

Italian Gardens

Finally, we located Peter, and there may or may not have been squealing.  The statue is fenced in, and we didn't enter the gates until two little girls broke the ice and just walked right in!  Then we decided that we needed our pictures taken with Peter and Tinkerbell, too! 

Peter Pan

I believe in fairies!!

Tinkerbell

 On our walk back to the bus stop, we saw some wildlife and a few interesting sights:

Swan by the water

Isis (sculpture by Simon Gudgeon)

Once we made it back to our street, we got take-away fish and chips for dinner and returned to our rooms.  I was a wimp and did not order my fish and chips with vinegar as is traditional here in the UK, but I enjoyed them, nonetheless.